I pondered what Brown says about
choosing to love with our whole hearts as it applies to wholehearted love in
cross-gender friendships:

“Choosing to live and love with our
whole hearts is an act of defiance. You’re going to confuse, piss off, and
terrify lots of people—including yourself” (The
Gift of Imperfection).

I also pondered it as a follower of
Jesus. Following Christ for a Christian is nothing less than an invitation to
live and love with our whole hearts. It’s so unmistakably clear.

It will come as no surprise to my
regular blog readers that I support healthy wholeheartedness in cross-gender
friendship. It’s the way of Christ for
men and women in the 21st century. I love connecting the language of
healthy wholehearted love with cross-gender friendship!

Of course, I’m well aware that doing so
is quite provocative and downright scary for many who still think wholehearted
love is only reserved for romantic relationships and marriage.

No question we need maps for the journey
of wholehearted love. I know many are pining for a paint by the numbers,
cookie-cutter, or formulaic approach to cross-gender friendship. I continue to
resist such appeals (I’ll elaborate more on that in a moment).

Boundaried
love between men and women is the path of shalom, healing, wholeness, sexual
integrity, well-being, beauty, and deep community. Wholeheartedness is not
about letting it all hang out in male-female relationships. It’s not about boundaryless relationships. It’s
not triangulation. It’s not emotional adultery. Healthy wholehearted love is not advocating
poor boundaries between men and women.

Healthy
wholehearted love = boundaried love. They’re the same at every step of the
journey.

Let’s start at a very basic, generic posture
of love: commitment to the other’s well being. From the beginning of every encounter
of a man and woman, a healthy wholehearted love desires this. This encounter can happen anywhere: online,
church, ministry, discipleship, mentoring, school, college, therapy, work,
recreation, and thousands of other places where encounter happens.

Map#
2 Healthy wholeheartedness is a discerning openness that can just as easily
say an enthusiastic yes or a full-blooded no in every male-female encounter
(married or nonmarried encounters).

This “map” I stoled from Robert
Augustus Masters (Spiritual Bypassing) but I give him the credit. This is boundaried
love: wholeheartedness no matter what the relationship and context.

Map
# 3 Healthy wholehearted love is the journey of recognizing we all (men and
women) live in a fallen world and we all bring baggage into our relationships.

Choose whatever lens you want to look
at this. Let’s face it we’re going to encounter disconnects as we relate to men
and women. There are some men and some women who cannot enter into intimate
friendships because of their brokenness, immediate weaknesses, or
vulnerabilities.

It’s the reality of this map that
encourages a posture of ongoing ambivalence (physical, emotional, intellectual,
spiritual or all the above) toward the opposite sex. It is this map that stirs
the distance in rules, boundaries, formulas, and cookie-cutter approaches.

It is the reality of this map that
discourages passion in marriage and in friendship. Many men and women are afraid
to fully enter into a healthy wholeheartedness even in marriage because of the
risks of becoming attached to someone because we live in a divorce culture.

There is no doubt we must give weight
to this map. However, if we put too much weight to this men and women would not
date or progress to marriage. Statistics show that non-sexual violence occurs
in 25% of all dating relationships—85% our women. Date rape according to some accounts
for 67% of sexual assaults on college campuses. Also, you have the whole
hook-up culture on campuses. Then there are the statistics of sexual, physical,
and emotional abuse in marriage. In addition to this, in United States, we have
one of the highest divorce rates in the Western world.

Do any of these brutal statistics cause
us to stop advocating romantic relationships and marriage between men and
women? Do any of these statistics stop
men and women from working closely side-by-side with each other in work,
ministry, and social causes?

No question it is a sober map. It’s
stark reality fosters all kinds of formulaic, rule-bound approaches to
male-female relating.

We believe it is possible for healthy
wholehearted love to develop and flourish in marriage even while acknowledging
the reality of this map.

As followers of Jesus why can’t we also
see that male-female flourishing in marriages
and beyond marriages (friendships)?

Map
# 4 Healthy wholehearted love is the journey to embrace all the present and
progressive good and beautiful by the other.

“Love begins when we are touched, stirred,
and moved by another thing’s goodness and beauty. Something about the other
person speaks to us, enters into us, and draws us out of ourselves” (Patricia
Lamoureux and Paul Wadell in The
Christian Moral Life).

This is my wholehearted conviction in
light of my journey of intimate cross-gender friendships after many years: all that is good and beautiful in friendship
is nevera threat to one’s marriage.
All that is good and beautiful in cross-gender friendship strengthens, heals,
and empowers the marital bond.

Wholehearted love in the Christian
story is not a narrow, infatuated, romance-absorbed, emotional exclusivity within
marriage. This has been the dominant script for male-female love
post-Freud. But this script is losing power. Some authors are even calling our current age the “post-romantic age” (Marriage
Confidential, Pamela Haag).

On the Christian side, Scot McKnight
follows this same thought of “post-romantic age” when he talks about married
love: “I’d like to suggest that the word romance
is not the right word because it doesn’t go far enough” (One.Life). There is something good and beautiful about romantic
love. But we have bought a narrative about romantic intensity that is not
shaped by a healthy wholehearted love.

No matter which way we look at it, we
are experiencing major shifts in how men and women relate to each other in
marriage in the 21st century.

Healthy wholehearted love in marriage
is not about codependency or unhealthy possession. Dr. Bonnie Jacobson, a New
York City clinical psychologist says, “Jealousy over an opposite-sex friendship
can be the result of projection.”

Respected author and psychologist David
Benner states, “Possessiveness always betrays a destructive element in any
relationship…Jealousy is as destructive in friendship as it is in marriage” (Sacred Companions).

There is an important and healthy sexual
exclusivity in marriage. There is something profoundly good and beautiful in
that exclusivity. It is more than just sex. It is an ongoing cherishing, trust, and
commitment to your spouse in a posture of healthy wholehearted love.

But in the Christian story (both in the
present age and in the next) relational goodness and beauty between men and
women (openness, responsiveness, creativity, trust, commitment, initiative,
receptivity, affection, vulnerability, generosity, etc.) are not narrowly confined
into a high-walled romantic ghetto.

Map
# 5 Relational goodness and beauty between men and women is about healthy
wholeheartedness that creates “already and not yet stories.”

These “already and not yet stories” are
stories of wholehearted love as we seek to practice the way of Jesus in our journey. There are many good stories out there with healthy
relationships between men and women in the world.

This is God’s world and his presence can
show up in any relationship anywhere in the world without an explicit Christian
affirmation. But as followers of Jesus
we see the way Jesus loved women wholeheartedly. We are to love as he loved.

In “already not yet stories” men and
women are committed to boundaried love in their marriages and friendships.

These stories may end up as powerful
stories of redemptive love between spouses and friends with deep trust and
wholehearted love. These stories are powerful expressions of healing between
men and women.

Friends in these stories work through
disconnect, hurt, disappointment, and misunderstanding that are inevitable to
happen. Friendship is a school of love where we learn how to be patient with
one another, how to be kind, how to be there for the other, how to open up to
the other, etc. As Brown notes, "Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity."

But part of “already and not yet”
stories in friendship is our embracing the realism that boundaried love goes
through various challenges, tests, and restructuring. Friendships are not
static. Some friends we are close to now we may not be as close (in terms of immediate sharing of our lives) to down the road for various reasons.

Some of us may nurture closeness between
friends because of a common ground or interest and once that commonality
disappears the closeness may fade away. Or discerning openness may choose to
withdraw intimacy for various reasons. Yet, still others may end up nurturing
an intimate bond in the healthy freedom of friendship that may endure for life.

Powerful “already not yet” stories are
expressions of a wholehearted love to engage the other in marriage and
friendship (spiritually, emotionally, physically, etc.) with a discerning
openness to goodness and beauty.

Jean Vanier wrote that, “Communion of
hearts is a beautiful but also a dangerous thing.” He adds it is, “mutual
vulnerability and openness one to the other. It is liberation for both, indeed,
where both are allowed to be themselves, where both are called to grow in
greater freedom and openness to others and to the universe."

Choosing wholehearted love is going to frighten people who live by paint by numbers when it comes to men and women. It's going to anger some people who want to stay stuck in unhealthy patterns. But it is the way forward for surprising beauty and goodness between men and women in the 21st century.